Mating Rituals
by Omnicat
Summary: Every time Loki tries to say "Will you marry me?" he instead says "I want to bear your children". It's getting to be a little disconcerting. / Loki x Jane


**Title:** Mating Rituals

**Author:** Omnicat

**Unofficially Adapted From:** Kenneth Branagh & co's _Thor_. Also includes references to Marvel's _Avengers_ and Norse mythology, the latter of course being ridiculously public domain.

**Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge:** _Thor_.

**Warnings:** Sex talk, passing mention of murder and suicidal thoughts, but most of all lots of crack.

**Characters & Pairings:** Loki x Jane, mention of Thor, Frigga and Sleipnir

**Summary:** Every time Loki tries to say "Will you marry me?" he instead says "I want to bear your chilren".

**Author's Note:** For the kink meme. Enjoy!

**II-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-I-oOo-I-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-II**

**Mating Rituals**

Loki tapped the microphone. It squaked gratingly.

"Testing, one, two, three." He cleared his throat. "Test: in the great beginning, there was only Ginnungagap, the void edged on one side in ice, and on the other, fire."

He hit the 'stop' button and played back the sound file he had just recorded.

"_Testing, one, two, three. Ahem. Test: in the great beginning, there was only Ginnungagap, the void edged on one side in ice, and on the other, fire."_

Nothing out of the ordinary. So far, so good. He hit 'record' again.

"I am a fish in a pinstripe suit. Will you marry me? There is a cat in my teacup. I want to bear your children."

Stop. Play back.

"_I am a fish in a pinstripe suit. Will you marry me? There is a cat in my teacup. I want to bear your children."_

He took out a picture of Jane and repeated the entire process. The results were the same. Then he conjured an illusion of her, as warm and solid and _real_ as he could make it, cast a two minute partial befuddlement to aid him in believing his own little deception, and repeated the process again. Once more, the results were the same.

Well. At least now he knew for sure that he wasn't hallucinating it. He either said one or the other. He did not hear one while saying the other. And he _was_ capable of saying either, at least under certain conditions.

The problem, therefore, was getting himself to say the right thing under the right conditions.

He wheeled his chair away from the table with the sound equipment and toward the table holding his mechanicized magic crystals. With a wave of his hand, they too stopped 'recording'. Here, too, he found what he had already been expecting: nothing. There was no sign of a curse on him, nor of any kind of entity possessing him, or any other form of magical meddling he could think of.

Oh well. It had been nice to pretend for a while.

Loki sighed, sat back, and let a wry smile tug at his lips.

The data did not lie; nothing and no-one was doing this to him but he himself.

**I-oOo-I**

The first time, he had said it in the heat of the moment. A rather frighteningly sentimental moment at that. He'd developed a worrying tendency toward those after overcoming the initial shock of falling in love with a woman who honest-to-goodness _loved him back_. And the mid-coital ones were always the worst.

Perched astride Loki's hips like she owned them, Jane had leaned down for a kiss, and as he cupped her cheek and touched his lips to hers, he had been, for whatever reason there ever was for these moods, struck full-force with his love for her. For this tiny, beautiful woman with her dazzling mind and warm heart – and her physical frailty and short lifespan.

Sometimes remembering the fleetingness of mortal life was like a punch to the gut. They had fifty, sixty years together, perhaps seventy if they were lucky. The rest of Jane's life. But it seemed like a mere season to him.

And then an idea had come to him that was so simple and perfect he wondered why he hadn't thought of it before. If he and Jane were married, she would be entitled to a golden apple of immortality of her own, such as Thor or Frigga came down to bring him once a year. Even in exile, he was still a prince of Asgard; he wasn't so damningly Jotun or banished so permanently as to have lost those rights.

His mind had filled with visions of all that could be, everything he could give her, all the years he could have her by his side. Had she the cosmic signature of an immortal, he could even take her along the secret paths, show her the universe she had dedicated her life to studying. They could explore the realms until the fivehundred years of his sentence were up, and then return to Asgard, start a family...

He'd blurted out the question before sanity could regain control over sappiness. Or at least, he'd _meant_ to.

What came out instead was not "Will you marry me?" but a rushed and garbled "I want to bear your children."

"What?" Jane had looked at him with absentminded confusion, the motion of her hips stilling. "You want to what?"

"Nothing," he'd said quickly. "I just thought of something I should remember next time I need to conjure things in a hurry."

She'd mock-frowned down at him. "You have time left to think? Clearly I'm not doing a good enough job."

He'd huffed out a secretly relieved laugh. "I can think out loud, if you want. I know how you love to hear me talk about teleportation and molecular rearrangement..."

**I-oOo-I**

The second time had been even worse. He'd woken Jane up with his tossing and turning and she, in turn, had woken him from a nightmare. Violent dreams were not a new development – Asgard was a warrior culture, after all. The subject matter just changed over time.

"Was it the fight with your brother again?" Jane had asked, running a soothing hand through his hair. It usually was, these days. Either a rehash of the real thing, or some twisted version where the knife slid into Thor's mortal belly and he did not wake up again, or their mother jumped up from the throne she filled while Odin slept to take the blow, or he looked down and saw he had struck Jane instead of Thor. The ones that seemed to recur most often were those where Thor took him up on his half-crazed demands that he fight back and slay the Jotun cuckoo in their father's house.

Fun stuff to reminisce on in the middle of the night. Luckily, Loki's dreams and their effects always faded within minutes of waking.

"No," he had said. "I dreamed you'd become an old crone overnight, and come morning, you drew your last breath before I had the chance to say goodbye."

She had understood immediately. That was perhaps the worst part.

"It won't be anywhere near that soon."

"It'll be soon enough," he'd replied blackly. His minutes hadn't been up yet. And though he had not spoken of it again, the moment irrevocably gone after that freak slip of the tongue, he had not gotten the idea of marriage (and home, and family, and children) from his mind either. So, with the courage of sleepdrunkenness, he had rolled over to face her fully and asked again.

And because the memory of last time _just happened_ to jump out in front of the wheels of his tongue just as it got moving, he ended up saying "I want to bear your children," _again_.

Unfortunately, she'd heard him loud and clear that time.

"_Bear my children?_" she'd repeated, looking flabbergasted. "What?"

He very, very much would have liked a timetravel spell, to go back and stuff a sock into his own mouth, just then.

Instead, he'd said, "...I can do that, you know."

"...you can?"

"I turned into a mare once and had a foal."

Jane had looked at him, rubbed her eyes, and looked at him again. "Holy nonsequitor, Batman."

The upside was that her curiosity kept her from taking his outburst as a serious proposition. By the time he had explained Sleipnir's unique existence in a level of detail that satisfied Jane's exacting standards, he probably would have succeeded in asking the right question. If only he hadn't been so mortified by his mouth's earlier mutiny.

Some time later, he'd considered that next time he should perhaps wait to pop the question until he was no longer feeling so bloody _maudlin_.

**I-oOo-I**

Easier said than done. The third time was when he'd gotten rip-roaring drunk off of makeshift poetry mead he'd brewed in Tony's basement. (Tony didn't get any. The stuff was so strong it would have killed him. Great way to die, but still.) Loki was _almost_ sure he'd done it on purpose that time, but Jane's amusement had still played a louder drum on his pride than the hangover did on the inside of his skull.

The fourth time happened after an explosion destroyed half of SHIELD headquarters – with Jane inside. When they found each other back, Jane had been shaky and covered in dust, but unharmed, and Loki had crushed her to him and said, "By the roots and branches I thought I'd lost you please don't ever scare my like that again please just let me have your babies already," without pausing for breath once. His mouth had been running on auto pilot, and he'd barely realised what he was saying. He also hadn't realised until later that Jane had been rendered temporarily deaf by the explosion. That made it easier to be relieved without feeling too guilty about it.

The fifth time, he had had an unfortunate lapse in muscle memory; he had made the split-second decision to take the brunt of an attack in order to advance his own without interruption and finally take out one of the Avengers' most tricky foes, knowing that an Asgardian healing stone would have fixed the damage thus incurred in a jippy. But there weren't any healing stones at hand. So he had had to be carried home on a stretcher, where the human doctors stitched up his skin and wrapped his broken ribs and sedated him with drugs that barely tickled his inhuman system, and the much slower and more painful process of weaving healing magic by hand had begun. Jane had been there with a whole arsenal of second-hand medical knowledge and all the concern and pampering instincts a woman could feel the first time her semi-divine lover came back whining and groaning like a baby. He hadn't even _meant_ the grateful moan-that-was-supposed-to-be 'marry me' that time!

**I-oOo-I**

The sixth time, Loki had actually _prepared_, something he did less often than people might think. Most of the time he liked the challenge of improvising, but as that hadn't worked out so far...

They had gone out to dinner. The night had been perfect, the food superb, the mood unparalleled. Finally, he had reached across the table to take Jane's hand and opened his mouth, the carefully rehearsed 'Will you marry me?' ready to roll off his tongue – when Jane's phone rang.

The instinct to pick up a ringing phone was deeply engrained in the Midgardian psyche, he knew, so he didn't blame Jane for ruining a perfect moment. But there was not a chair in the world safe for Phil Coulson to sit in for weeks afterward.

Jane had ended her call and turned back toward Loki with an apologetic grimace. "Lab explosion. My assistent will have to keep to bed for a week or so while the extra limbs retreat. I'm sorry, I should've remembered to turn it off. You were saying something?"

"Yes," he had said, thinking _fuck it all_. (His vocabulary had taken a decidely Midgardian turn in the years he'd been staying there.) "I really would like to bear your children. For science, you know. It would be awesome."

And he'd been too busy being passive-agressively cheerful for the rest of the night to ask the right question after all.

**I-oOo-I**

Which brought him to the present, to the lab he had commandeered to convince himself once and for all that something _had_ to be done.

Loki wheeled his nifty wheeled chair over to a computer and logged onto the internet.

**I-oOo-I**

He waited until it was Jane's birthday. He cleared out the entire SHIELD building for the night (there would be a shitstorm over that later, but really, what good was it to have all that magic if you weren't going to abuse it once in a while?) and lured Jane there with a note placed on their bed.

_I have kidnapped your lover's libido! Come to the office tonight at midnight, or you will never see it again!_

_Signed,_

_an evil man with penis envy who could only dream of having such a wonderful woman to share a sex life with_

_PS: Please make sure to enter through the front door._

Loki hid in the shadows as Jane slipped inside. As intended, her eyes went to the giant neon sign on the reception desk. It read,

_MOST BELOVED JANE, _

– with a giant hand pointing to the nearest staircase. On the door to said staircase hung another neon sign.

_I_

Jane pushed through the door to find the next sign on the wall in front of her – and another on the next wall, after the staircase turned, and so on.

_WANT_

_TO_

_BEAR_

_YOUR_

_CHILDREN _

A second giant hand pointed her into the third floor hallway.

_WHICH_

_IS_

_TO_

_SAY..._

She turned corner after corner, her pace quickening, until she reached the massive glass wall fronting the building. There she skidded to a halt. Her hand slowly went to her mouth.

"Oh, Loki..." he heard her whisper. She looked around for him, but now that he'd gone this far, he intended to milk his creative cowardice for all it was worth.

_WILL YOU MARRY ME, JANE FOSTER?_

Another arrow. The signs led her criss-cross through the building, up and down the stairs, through labs and offices and gyms.

_I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT POSSESSED ME TO KEEP SAYING 'I WANT TO BEAR YOUR CHILDREN'. MUST BE THAT 'FREUDIAN SLIP' I'VE HEARD ABOUT. MARRYING AN ASGARDIAN MEANS YOU GET TO BECOME IMMORTAL, BUT PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT IMMORTALITY IS AN ONGOING PROCESS THAT CAN BE ABORTED AT ANY MOMENT. JUST IN CASE YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND._

There was more, but at that point she stopped running and spun around, looking for him. "Loki? LOKI!"

Deciding that it wouldn't do him any favours to hide any longer, Loki released his camouflage and stepped forward. When she caught sight of him, Jane launched herself at him with full force.

"I do, I do! Of course I'll marry you!"

There was a sloppy, nose-knocking, extatic kiss, and Loki lifted Jane up and spun her around, laughing, and then they kissed again. At some point, they stumbled their way into a conveniently placed lounge and fell back onto a couch in a tangle of roaming limbs and exhilerated giggles.

"I'm never going to change my mind," Jane managed to say between wrestling off his tie and her own coat. "And hell if I know why you'd want to, but you can have as many of my babies as you like."

"I don't know either, love, I don't know either." He pulled her on top of him, her chest pressed to his, and grinned. "But we can start now."


End file.
